Quotes from Shattered Mirror

“I'm standing in a slaughterhouse where the cattle are begging to become hamburgers. I have a right to be jumpy.”
― Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, quote from Shattered Mirror

“Skin like ivory, perfect; A goddess, she
must be.
Slender fingers, unadorned; beautiful
simplicity.
A single teardrop; when did it fall?
Could this goddess be mortal, after all?”
― Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, quote from Shattered Mirror

“Christopher . . . are these from you?” she asked at lunch, careful to make her tone light as she placed the two picture-poems on the table. Christopher’s eyes fell to them, and he smiled.
“Yes.”
He didn’t ask if she liked them, and he didn’t seem embarrassed.
Sarah was flustered, and somewhat surprised by Christopher’s easy confidence. Even so, her natural suspicion surfaced. “Why?”
“Because,” he answered seriously, “you make a good subject. Your hair, for one, is like a shimmering waterfall. It’s so fair that it catches the light. It makes you seem like you have a halo about you. And your eyes—they’re such a pure color, not washed out at all, deep as the ocean. And your expression . . . intense and yet somehow detached, as if you see more of the world than the rest of us.”
Flustered, she could think of no way to respond. Did he just say this stuff from the top of his head? Only her strict Vida control kept her from blushing.
Meanwhile Nissa entered the cafeteria. She started to sit, then glanced from the pictures, to Christopher, to Sarah. “Should I go somewhere else?”
Christopher nodded to a chair, answering easily, “Sit down. We aren’t exchanging dark secrets—yet.”
Nissa flashed a teasing look to her brother as she took a seat. “As his sister, I feel the need to inform you, Sarah, that Christopher has been talking about you incessantly.”
Christopher smiled, unembarrassed. “I suppose I might have been.’
“Especially your eyes—he never shuts up about your eyes,” Nissa confided, and this time Christopher shrugged.
“They’re beautiful,” he said casually. “Beauty should be looked at, not ignored. I try to capture it on paper, but that’s really impossible with eyes, because they have a life no still portrait can capture.”
Sarah’s voice was tied up so tightly she thought she might be able to speak again sometime next year. No one had ever talked about her—or to her—with such admiration.”
― Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, quote from Shattered Mirror

“Yet he wasn’t doing anything threatening at the moment. Instead, he was regarding her with curiosity. “Sarah Vida, I presume?” he inquired, voice civil.
“Making sure introductions are out of the way before we fight?” she asked flippantly.”
― Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, quote from Shattered Mirror

“Nikolas.
If it scarred, she was going to be really annoyed.
“Is your control really this good, or are you a secret masochist?” Nikolas asked as he cut the tail of the S, a jagged underline.
“Is this a ritual thing, or are you just a sadist?” she returned, impatient. Though he was enjoying his busywork, he wasn’t focused enough for Sarah to act.
“Both,” he answered, laughing, as he turned to the other arm. “You can ask me to stop any time now.” She understood what he really meant--You can break down and beg. “Or must I continue?”
“Hurry up, would you?” She yawned. “I have to get to the drugstore before it closes. We’re out of Band-Aids at my house.”
― Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, quote from Shattered Mirror

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“The earlier Aryan invaders of the Gangetic Plain presided over feasts of cattle, horses, goats, buffalo, and sheep. By later Vedic and early Hindu times, during the first millenium B.C., the feasts came to be managed by the priestly caste of Brahmans, who erected rituals of sacrifice around the killing of animals and distributed the meat in the name of the Aryan chiefs and war lords. After 600 B.C., when populations grew denser and domestic animals became proportionately scarcer, the eating of meat was progressively restricted until it became a monopoly of the Brahmans and their sponsors. Ordinary people struggled to conserve enough livestock to meet their own desperate requirements for milk, dung used as fuel, and transport. During this period of crisis, reformist religions arose, most prominently Buddhism and Jainism, that attempted to abolish castes and hereditary priesthoods and to outlaw the killing of animals. The masses embraced the new sects, and in the end their powerful support reclassified the cow into a sacred animal. So it appears that some of the most baffling of religious practices in history might have an ancestry passing in a straight line back to the ancient carnivorous habits of humankind. Cultural anthropologists like to stress that the evolution of religion proceeds down multiple, branching pathways. But these pathways are not infinite in number; they may not even be very numerous. It is even possible that with a more secure knowledge of human nature and ecology, the pathways can be enumerated and the directions of religious evolution in individual cultures explained with a high level of confidence.”
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“It is weird being different. But what if it were fun? What if it weren’t wrongness but simply a difference?
What if the Earth let you come here because of that difference?
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“One of the risks of being quiet is that the other people can fill your silence with their own interpretation: You’re bored. You’re depressed. You’re shy. You’re stuck up. You’re judgemental. When others can’t read us, they write their own story—not always one we choose or that’s true to who we are.”
― Sophia Dembling, quote from The Introvert's Way: Living a Quiet Life in a Noisy World

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

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